Thank you.
Hello, and welcome to this episode of Hack and Public Radio with your host, Operator.
This episode is going to be over DD underscore rescue, and DD underscore our help, which
is a helper script for DD rescue, and DD underscore rescue is not to be confused with
DD rescue.
So here, I'm here on out when I say DD rescue, I'm referring to DD underscore rescue.
So first off, what state does the drive have to be in? You have a drive that picked up
by the BIOS first off. It needs to be at least picked up by the BIOS, and it's something
can talk to it. Be it hopefully, if it's an NTFS partition, Windows can at least mount
the drive as a readable drive and see the partitions. Or secondly, you can use something like
FDs to be able to display inside of units Linux. What the partition information is, and
see if you can at least pull that much off of it. So the set up I have is IDE0, or the first
ID is the C-ROM, and second unslave is going to be the backup drive. And then the other
ID channel open to, I put the backup drive that I'm going to drive and go into actually
image, the bad drive, and then the drive that is known good that I'm going to image
2, which is going to be the same size or larger, and that's going to be the secondary.
This will allow you to, once you've actually made a good image of the drive, you can go
ahead without rebooting anything and push that image straight on to your known good drive.
Along with this, I've got the laptop to IDE, and also the SATA to IDE converter, plugged
into that same chain. So if I need to do any of that prior, then it will all be set up
good to go. Also, you'll want to, if you can format the drive, if you're going to put
the image on to something unique, like, compatible, XT3, or UFS, whatever, this will work a
little bit better as far as mounting it, and it won't have to worry about closing
it, or cross-platform stuff. So the drive's picked up, you've got everything set up.
The first thing you want to notice is check F disc, or whatever partitioned manager you want
to use, and look and see where your partition started and where they stopped, and things
like that. So this way, if you have to, you can just back up from the beginning, you can
back up the actual partitions, the master boot record, and all that fits up before you
start to actually touch the disc. Next thing is, it's going to take some time. It's
depending on how bad the drive is, where the bad parts are, how often they are, how slow
it is, and transfer rate, how big the drive is. 166 gig drive took at, right at about
three days to make an image of, and probably a total of four days to, once for a
station, and putting it on the new drive. So easiest thing, I use a, a live CD called
G-partnid. It's similar to a commercial version of partition magic, and also a USB stick
with a few noted items on there about different things where boot sectors are, then just
notes I have on the USB stick. And also, I have the DD underscore R help, which is also
in the show note. And this is what the cast is mainly going to be about. The helper
application for DD rescue, called DD underscore R help. Like I said, I had no problems
running it off of G-partnid live distribution, off of a thumb drive. Once you verify
that you're riding to the right disc and trying to read from the right bad disc or
known disc with errors on it, you'll see the basic command line options for DD underscore
help. It's just pretty much the same thing as DD rescue, except there's a few other
other switches for. The first thing is it will automatically create a log file. And this
log file is sort of kind of hard to read at first. But essentially, if you read the
documentation and if FAQ and everything for DD underscore R help, it'll tell you exactly
what it's doing, what it's doing, the log files, and it'll be a little bit clear,
a good, you know, halfway into it, you'll understand how it works. Mainly, you're going
to look through F disc and see how big the partition is or disc is that you're copying.
How many blocks it has total? From there, you'll be able to read where DD rescue is at
any given time and how much it's actually copied. If it goes from one end to the disc to
the other, it will show the image will show a full size of the actual disc. Being as
that it's skipping over parts that it kind of fails at, it's going to display kind of
a false information that's all by disc is completely backed up. No, you what you want
to do is read the log files and look for a line called EOS in caps. This will tell you
where DD underscore R help is that how much it's how many blocks it's copied or at least
tried to copy and I like it stuff. And after a while, you'll see something inside of the log
and also from the actual command line, you'll see bar and it'll detects representation
of where it's at on the disc. At first, basically, you'll see a bunch of dots. And as it goes
over, they'll turn it to X's. So the dots are not parsed. Jump points are going to be stars,
and parsed is means parts that it's already tried to go over to where it's gone over.
And how it works, if you go to the documentation, it starts off, hits an air,
skips a little bit, and then once it's gone through the whole disc, it goes back and picks the
biggest chunk that it missed. Starts in the middle and goes from the middle to the left,
the middle to the right, meaning from the middle reverse and from the middle forward. And I will
leave some in the show notes, I'll leave some example of the bar output. So you'll kind of see
what it looks like further down the road. Also, there's some other things. I didn't have to do
tweak any settings, but you can do things like disable or enable DMA to make the
things go faster or slower. The whole idea of DD underscore our help is to make the process faster,
instead of sitting there, dan for on the same, you know, 500 blocks, it's going to skip over
those portions and come back to it later. So this utilizes the time that it takes to run a full
DD rescue scanner, DD scan or copy. Pretty much wraps up this episode of Agre Public Radio,
anybody has any questions about the episode or any other previous episodes?
You can contact me from the website and I'll try and help you as that's okay.
Thank you for listening to Acre Public Radio, AGO sponsored by Gero.net.
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